But did you know: Facebook is planning to stop paying publishers to create videos for its news feed(Digiday)
Digiday’s Sahil Patel reports that multiple publishers say Facebook has told them it plans to end the program that paid publishers to produce videos for the news feed each month. Most of the deals, which required publishers to produce a minimum number of both on-demand and live video minutes each month, are set to expire at the end of this year. “The sources said Facebook has told them it’s ending this program and won’t be renewing the deals, which by one estimate encompassed some 300 publishers, celebrities and other video creators,” Patel reports. “Now, Facebook’s efforts are entirely focused on funding shows for Watch, for which it’s already telling content partners that it wants to fund less shows but with bigger budgets.”

The smart way to start your day

Each morning we scour the web for fresh useful insights in our Need to Know newsletter. Sign up below.

4 applications of automated transcription in the newsroom (BBC News Lab)
Newsrooms have a lot of reasons to be excited about automated transcription, BBC News Labs’ senior software engineer Alex Norton writes: “Speech-to-text technology, which uses machine learning to produce transcripts of audio, has the potential to save journalists the time they spend manually typing up their interviews and news organizations the money they pay third-party companies to do the same work.” Norton highlights some examples of how automated transcription can be used in the newsroom: Transcripts make the contents of audio/visual files easily searchable, auto transcription can speed up video captioning and subtitling, and it can cut down video editing time by allowing editors to work directly from a transcript as opposed to timecodes.

2 Reuters reporters who were working on stories about a military crackdown on the Muslim minority in Myanmar were arrested(Reuters)
Myanmar’s government said on Wednesday that two Reuters journalists, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, were arrested along with two policemen and were facing charges under the British colonial-era Official Secrets Act. Reuters says the journalists were working on stories about a military crackdown on the Rohingya Muslim minority in Rahkine State, which has led to almost 650,000 people fleeing to Bangladesh. The government says the reporters “illegally acquired information with the intention to share it with foreign media.” Reuters’ president and editor in chief Stephen J. Adler said: “We are outraged by this blatant attack on press freedom. We call for authorities to release them immediately.”

Transforming the hiring process: ‘Just banish the cover letter’(Poynter)
When KPCC started hiring its managing editor, Southern California Public Radio’s chief content officer Kristen Muller set out to totally transform its hiring process. The first step? Getting rid of the cover letter. Taking a cue from Hearken’s hiring process, KPCC is instead asking a few specific questions about the organization and the job itself. Besides creating more work for the person who has to read them, cover letters can cause a person who has the skills for the job, but not necessarily the skills for writing a cover letter, to get overlooked.

‘Roy Moore thought attacking the press could save his campaign. Voters opted for the truth.’ (Washington Post)
Roy Moore’s “relentless disparagement [of the news media] was as ugly as it was anti-democratic,” Margaret Sullivan writes. “But this is an encouraging moment nonetheless. Because what amounted to a test case for relying on the ‘fake news’ technique failed in Alabama. That might mean candidates running for office all over the nation will be a bit less likely to consult the Trump playbook for their own campaigns. You can be sure that if it had prevailed, the technique would have spread to every state legislature race and sheriff’s campaign in the country.”